Re: Because victory wasn't achievable to begin with

Most of these points have already been addressed, and since I agreed
with the way they were refuted, I'll only add new comments.

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Marc Clifton wrote:

> because it's perfectly clear to me why the XUL community has failed.

I don't see that it has failed.

> Very few people want to touch a GPL project.

That isn't true. For starters, Linux (and of course, GNU) is entirely GPL
and yet is used as a platform for running free, open source, and
proprietary applications.

Just because a XUL motor, for example, is GPL, doesn't mean that
applications written on it have to be.

> The whole concept of declarative markup to instantiate classes, set
> properties, and instantiate collections was basically an exercise in
> futility (or an interesting lab experiment) before .NET and reflection
> came along.

The criteria above has been met by Java since (1997?), so I'm not sure I
understand that sentence, but if I'm correct, then the copyright notice
here (http://www.castor.org/), to give one simple example, shows this not
to be true. This doesn't apply to UI objects, but the principle meets your
criteria above. All the Java XUL motors must use a similar technique.

> Seven, the concept of XUL is beautiful.  But how much education as the XUL
> community done to teach programmers about the flexibility of decoupling
> presentation layer from event process, similar to the MVC pattern?

I fully agree. The mind-shift required by programmers to understand the
subtleties of true presentation/logic separation shouldn't be
underestimated, particularly by advocates of a XUL approach who have
perhaps already become familiar with it. Kind of similar to the shift from
desktop applications to server side web applications. As I recall, that
wasn't a particularly easy transition either.

> The underlying concepts of XUL is closely tied with the MVC pattern,

true

> agile programming, and aspect oriented programming.  If people don't
> understand those concepts, they'll never buy into XUL.

Aspect oriented programming applies generally to all kinds of programming
(in theory, if not in practice) - as do agile methods, but I can't see how
either are pre-requisites to XUL.

My tuppence worth,

Kevin




-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials
Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of
GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system
administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click